Executive Summary

The BigCommerce Difference

The biggest differences between the BigCommerce and Magento ecommerce platforms

For many years, the Magento ecommerce platform has been the retail industry go-to for running an enterprise online store. However, when most businesses first made Magento their solution of choice, it was the only viable option out there.

In fact, six to seven years ago, the only other options were small and largely ineffective tools such as Volusion, Miva Merchant and Yahoo stores — and high-end solutions such as IBM Websphere, ATG and the Microsoft Commerce server. These left a huge chasm for merchants looking for a platform to support a business doing more than $5 million and less than $100 million per year. Merchants in this range were often left shelling out large amounts of money for licenses, installations, software integrations and overall maintenance. For Magento Enterprise customers, this meant paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to support an online presence each year.

Today, Magento is no longer the only viable option in the mid-market and enterprise retail sectors. SaaS platforms like BigCommerce have disrupted this market, allowing for deep customization, unlimited products, application level uptime SLAs of 99.9%, 24/7 support, one-click application integration, seamless product updates and a solid commerce hub from which to manage business operations.

All of these SaaS features deliver a reduction in overhead costs of up to 75% compared to Magento EE, with no hosting, maintenance or update expenses. Mid-market merchants who have made the choice to sell on BigCommerce are seeing a 28% year-over-year same-store sales growth –– nearly twice the ecommerce industry average.

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Introduction

Guide Overview

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Of course, making a change is always a strategic business decision.

BigCommerce understands the need to vet and test a platform before making such a move. To begin the process, this document outlines BigCommerce’s five crucial differentiators from Magento. The goal is to empower businesses with the necessary information to decide which is the right platform moving forward.

Here are the biggest differences between BigCommerce and Magento..

Lower total cost of ownership

BigCommerce offers lower total cost of ownership, typically reducing expenses by as much as 75%. That frees up resources to invest in driving top-line business growth. Businesses partnering with BigCommerce benefit from:

Hosting costs that are already included in the BigCommerce price

BigCommerce taking on the onus of maintaining servers and equipment

Reduced reliance on development resources thanks to pre-built site templates and integrations with industry-leading software

Increased scalability

BigCommerce’s capacity scales based on the need to accommodate peak periods, like flash sales and the holiday season. With on-premise solutions like Magento, businesses have to buy extra server capacity and maintain additional staff to accommodate volume fluctuations during the year.

BigCommerce offers Level 1 PCI compliance and keeps up with constantly changing credit card regulations. With Magento, merchants must take on the full burden of PCI compliance and ever-evolving regulation changes.

BigCommerce offers automatic software upgrades. In contrast, Magento merchants using any version of 1.x have to go through a complete re-platforming of their online store to take advantage of the latest version, Magento 2.0. This is taxing to any business, costing at least $100,000 and 3-4 months of development.

World-class site security, speed and fraud protection

BigCommerce offers industry-leading uptime, page load speed and site security. BigCommerce offers a 99.99% uptime with an average site response time of ⅓ of a second. It also features integrated fraud protection tools and multi-layered security, including perimeter and server-specific firewalls, file integrity scanners, intrusion detection software and 24/7 human monitoring.

In contrast, merchants using Magento are constantly suffering major security issues and have to invest in a 20-hour retainer block per month to deal with them. The average hourly rate is $150, which means a merchant could be spending $3,000 per month or more to manage security issues.

Pre-built integrations with industry-leading software solutions

BigCommerce offers an extensive library of pre-built integrations that deliver cutting-edge innovation while reducing time and resources required for implementation.

BigCommerce is the market leader in omni-channel retailing, enabling seamless management of online and offline storefronts, social selling and marketplaces from one central location. As a SaaS platform, BigCommerce is able to bring customers the latest technology innovations, including buy buttons on Pinterest and Facebook, vs. on-premise software which is outdated quickly.

BigCommerce fully integrates best-in-class third party apps like ShipperHQ and Sift Science, delivering cutting-edge innovation at no additional cost. In contrast, Magento’s customers have to rely on third-party extensions that are often incompatible with the most recent version of the software or with the version used by the customer.

2x growth with advanced merchandising tools and optimized checkout

BigCommerce offers out-of-the-box advanced merchandising features like faceted search, promotion rules and discounts, customer groups and catalog hierarchy. Businesses can also easily promote products based on buying history, target long-time customers with rewards and win back previous shoppers with special offers.

BigCommerce is the only ecommerce platform to offer PayPal One Touch. It allows the 170+ million PayPal shoppers worldwide to check out instantly by securely storing login details in a desktop or mobile browser. Additionally, BigCommerce’s proprietary single-page checkout improves conversion up to 12% by making it faster and easier to complete a purchase. This functionality is not included with Magento —it requires an integration and associated costs.

BigCommerce offers completely customizable themes and templates, allowing businesses to change a site’s look with no coding necessary. Developers can use BigCommerce’s flexible theme framework to build a completely custom online store using HTML, CSS and popular code libraries and frameworks. It’s the industry’s best solution for building custom ecommerce sites and the only hosted platform that offers a local development environment with access to live product data. It also offers conditional logic for shopper personalization and simultaneous previewing on desktop and mobile displays. Magento themes must be built in coordination with a design partner and updated through those partners when changes are needed. Additionally, all Magento 2.0 upgrades will require a complete re-platforming of any existing theme builds.

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Introduction

Guide Overview

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Chapter 1

Title One

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Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style. This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

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Introduction

Guide Overview

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Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of large quote. More Text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.This is an example of large quote. More Text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

This is also a way to see a left justified copy treatment. Just make sure it starts on the second column with quote marks aligned top.

Header lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Introduction

Guide Overview

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style. This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

Header lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Introduction

Guide Overview

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of large quote. More Text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.This is an example of large quote. More Text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

This is also a way to see a left justified copy treatment. Just make sure it starts on the second column with quote marks aligned top.

Header lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Introduction

Guide Overview

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style. This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

Header lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Introduction

Guide Overview

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of large quote. More Text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.This is an example of large quote. More Text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

This is also a way to see a left justified copy treatment. Just make sure it starts on the second column with quote marks aligned top.

Header lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Introduction

Guide Overview

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.

This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style. This is an example of a large quote. More text is added to reveal the line-height of the text style.

Header lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Introduction

Guide Overview

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Chapter 1

Title One

Subhead dolor sit amet, vel et vide inermis

Coming more and more essential that all ecommerce business,regarldess of size, implement sophisticated on-site search technology to help their shoppers and the items they want as quickly and conveniently as possible. The items they want as quickly and conventiently as possible.